Update:
Weigh 205 lbs this morning (5lbs lost since began this thread.)

I've made the following changes:
*No sugar/bread or gluten in the house. There's still some gluten free pancake flour, fruits, starchy vegetables, tortillas, and a few more carby things left. I see low/medium carb for me but way less than I had before.

*No eating after midnight.

*2x24hr fasts per week, typically 4pm-4pm. This is, I believe, the needle mover. I notice I tend to overeat so this makes up for that as overeating even healthy food will lead to fat gain. I try not to have these fasts too close to each other or get in the way of any social events by planning them out ahead of time. These make my life more convenient since I'm not thinking about food all the time and fasts aren't hard now that junk food is out of the house.

*Daily biking for a few minutes, enough to get me warmed up and not enough to make excuses for not doing it.

I'm still having vegetable soup every day.

Overall, I'm quite happy. I plan to do this all year then cut down to 1 fast per week and keep the sugar, bread, and gluten as a weekly or less thing.

I also plan to overeat less often but this may be harder to stop. I get a free nutritionist with my health insurance so I'm going to my appointment in a week or so.

Still fasting twice a week and got the family onboard to doing 1 of those fasts with me each week. The vegetable soups are helpful in nutrition more than weight loss.

I would've lost more weight if I hadn't bought $15 of chocolate in the first 2 weeks. Got the craving out and I don't foresee that happening again. Also hiked less with all the rain storms. Reconnected with a hiking partner so I've been hiking more with this past week during the intermittent dry days.

The nutritionist appointment was a bit of a let down but refinding intermittent fasting has more than made up for it. I think it'll realistically take about a year losing a pound a week to reach a 6 pack but there's no rush. I see a huge analogy to building wealth in that I've accumulated a debt (excess calories) that I'm now paying off (burning more calories than consume) so I can be patient here. I'm seeing how every meal, every hike vs lazy day all have an effect.

4-5 years ago, I lost just shy of 40lbs. Unfortunately, I gained it all back again due to falling back into old habits and experiencing a long period of work-related stress where I would comfort eat to feel better in the short term.

I think adopting new food habits is really the key. I lost weight by tracking literally everything that I ate. By forcing this new habit upon myself, I became highly aware of how many calories I was consuming during a day and in this way, I started making food budgets. Whenever I got cravings for a particular food (usually something sugary or otherwise calorie dense), I would make note of just how many calories I'd have to spend from my budget to eat it. More often than not, that simple math made me decide not to eat the food in question.

It sounds like a lot of work, and in the beginning there was a lot of measuring required, but as I mostly ate the same varied bunch of foods over a longer timespan, I eventually had a pretty good idea of how many calories were in the meals that I was consuming.

Oh and exercise helps, but nowhere near as much as strict diet control.

My mantra: 'The point of resistance is in the store.' When I have the urge to buy something other than staples or vegetables, I look at the calorie content for the whole package, because chances that I'll eat a designated "serving" once it's in the kitchen crooning my name are pretty much zero.

I recommend reading the 4 hour body by Tim Ferris. It has helped me going from 20% body fat to 12% in just 4 weeks, its a ketogenic diet with a free day per week. I still eat that way even if i added more carbs along the way to not go below 12% body fat. I feel now as i am in complete control over my body weight and muscle gain. A diary of my weight, body measurements, food intake, exercise and excrements were very helpful.
What also helped to better understand the human body was the german book "Hormesis: Das Prinzip der Widerstandskraft. Wie Stress und Gift uns stärker machen". Its not available in english but maybe somebody else has a good english book on Hormesis?

In my eyes a diet that makes calorie counting necessary is a diet not worth looking at, because it leaves a lot of variables out of the field and is hard to keep. For example you are not looking at energy lost by heating/cooling the body or what parts of the food are really used by your body. The body is simply not an oven where the food is burned, which is implied by counting calories. Its also a question of timing the meals with exercise. You want that blood sugar to go to your muscles not your belly and therefore it is always important to exercise while dieting. Otherwise you will lose muscle and because of a lower metabolic rate regain more weight after the diet than you had before.

To the fasting debate i would argue that short rounds of fasting are very good for the body because they stress it and cause a hormetic reaction which make the body stronger. (i simply leave the evening meal out on some days). As a by-product It kills cancer cells, because they are not as stress resistant as normal human cells. But long fasts will surely cause long term damage. And i would argue that going vegan or vegetary is not the healthiest way to live, because a little bit of meat each week can make you stronger via hormesis.

I've read the 4 hour body and I've listened to Tim's podcast for years. I've found that his advice on diet and exercise is so full of shit that it's barely worth listening to. (some of his podcast guests do seem to give very good advice like some russian/soviet guy he had on about a year or so ago, can't remember the name... but then he asks guests know very little about fitness to share their routines and insights as if they matter.) He goes on and on about all kinds of supplements takes himself. He talks them up like they are some special key to whatever. Then a few months later he'll casually mention that he's not taking them anymore because he found out or decided that (those) supplement might have some kind of serious long-term side effect. But oh, he's just found some other super duper magic key supplement or order of doing things in your day...

All that said, slow-carb sounds decent. I'm exaggerating some in the above, but lately I've just gotten tired of some of the stuff he does. Like he'll have some awesome guest with great stories and waste 1/3 of the show asking about the exact order of things the person does when they wake up in the morning, like, "ok, do you meditate and then masturbate? Or masturbate first? And how many minutes do you shower for? Do you brush your teeth before the shower?" A few weeks ago he had a guest going on and on about how special interval training is, but the actual content of the show was incredibly simple and only relevant for basically untrained people, yet presented as the end-all of advice on cardiovascular/endurance conditioning (them seriously saying that like 3 minutes of intense effort is all you'd ever need to do)

I've read the 4 hour body and I've listened to Tim's podcast for years. I've found that his advice on diet and exercise is so full of shit that it's barely worth listening to. (some of his podcast guests do seem to give very good advice like some russian/soviet guy he had on about a year or so ago, can't remember the name... but then he asks guests know very little about fitness to share their routines and insights as if they matter.) He goes on and on about all kinds of supplements takes himself. He talks them up like they are some special key to whatever. Then a few months later he'll casually mention that he's not taking them anymore because he found out or decided that (those) supplement might have some kind of serious long-term side effect. But oh, he's just found some other super duper magic key supplement or order of doing things in your day...

All that said, slow-carb sounds decent. I'm exaggerating some in the above, but lately I've just gotten tired of some of the stuff he does. Like he'll have some awesome guest with great stories and waste 1/3 of the show asking about the exact order of things the person does when they wake up in the morning, like, "ok, do you meditate and then masturbate? Or masturbate first? And how many minutes do you shower for? Do you brush your teeth before the shower?" A few weeks ago he had a guest going on and on about how special interval training is, but the actual content of the show was incredibly simple and only relevant for basically untrained people, yet presented as the end-all of advice on cardiovascular/endurance conditioning (them seriously saying that like 3 minutes of intense effort is all you'd ever need to do)

Yes i agree, i basically ignored everything where he talked about supplements.

agreed. so many contradictions. favorite example from 4h body: first Ferriss raves about insulin and how carbs raise it, which is why especially "fast acting carbs" should be cut out. next chapter he recommends consuming whey protein powder first thing in the morning.

whey protein is, of course, one of the most insulinogenic foods in existence.

agreed. so many contradictions. favorite example from 4h body: first Ferriss raves about insulin and how carbs raise it, which is why especially "fast acting carbs" should be cut out. next chapter he recommends consuming whey protein powder first thing in the morning.

whey protein is, of course, one of the most insulinogenic foods in existence.

Maybe because the first chapter is about losing fat fast and the next about gaining muscles fast? I can understand when you want to criticize him, but a lot of the stuff that he wrote about is worth reading. Just not all. The proposed diet (better: proposed change of eating habits) in the book is something that works and some of the workout/theory related stuff is good, too.

As @herp says, I recommend the strategy of logging everything you eat and enforcing a daily (or weekly) calorie budget, targeting 0.5 to 1 pound lost per week.

This is similar to the YMOYL exercise of logging all spending, in that it forces you to be conscious about the bottom-line of where resources are actually flowing. I'm "meh" on exclusion/exclusion rules (e.g. no refined sugar allowed) because human nature tends to cause people to game the system (e.g. load up sugary foods that are not "refined" on a technicality). The logging may sound daunting, but technology can help, for example https://www.loseit.com/ .

As you log foods you'll develop a sense for how satisfying foods are relative to how many calories they "cost," and can start planning your meals around ingredients with a high satisfaction/kcal ratio. Analogous to how tracking monetary spending steers you toward spending only on high value/price purchases.

And now for a list of tactics that fit within that strategy, at least for me:

- Drink only water, or negligible-calorie drinks: coffee, tea, or as a last resort, diet soda.
- Water-dense ingredients help to add bulk and a feeling of fullness without a lot of calories: broth (e.g. have chicken soup instead of chicken nuggets), lettuce, greens, bell peppers, zucchini, onions, celery, tomatoes, broccoli.
- Use varied textures to add interest instead of rich ingredients: crunchy vegetables, slippery noodles, sticky peanut butter, etc.
- Fresh herbs add a lot of taste and visual appeal for negligible calories. I use parsley, cilantro, basil, or green onions in almost every recipe.
- Searing meat can make a small portion punch above its weight (Maillard reaction).
- Generally speaking, dishes are made "extreme" through 1) excessive fat, 2) excessive sugar, 3) excessive salt, or 4) excessive spiciness. Of these, (3) and (4) do not cost calories, but (3) can be unhealthy. So explore spicy food.
- Some dressings and condiments are negligible-calories (balsamic, mustard, ketchup) while others are almost pure fat calories (mayonnaise, ranch dressing).
- Routines eliminate decision-making and therefore opportunities for poor decisions. I cook and portion out my weekday breakfasts and lunches ahead of time on the weekend. Then during the week I'm "forced" to follow through on the plan.
- Minimize high-carb foods because the energy burns off quickly leading to low blood sugar and cravings between meals.
- Learn to distinguish between the feeling of being not-quite-full, and actual hunger, and to tune out the former. Try to form a habit of satisfying not-quite-fullness by drinking water instead of eating snacks.
- Almost never worth it: caloric beverages, candy, fast food, dessert, meat-heavy meals, bread-heavy meals.
- Surprisingly worth it: cream in coffee, sprinklings of butter or bacon, beans and rice, lean pork, lightly-dressed green salad.
- I tend to find interesting recipes compatible with the above from the cuisines of Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Waist to 38.5", weight to 188.8lbs at its lightest (end of last Thursday-Friday fast). That's a little over 20lbs of fat in 4 months. I don't think the next 4 months will yield as much fat loss. I'm still focused on getting a 6 pack so probably 8+ months to lose the remaining 30+ lbs. A health challenge I experienced has alleviated to the point of cutting my prescription. Expecting the hints of symptoms to disappear completely in 10 or 20 lbs.

What I've done:
Simple as possible-fasting twice a week for 24 hours and try not to binge. I love this because I can still go out and not worry about what I'm eating. I keep healthy food (vegetable soup always ready) at home so pizza/burgers out once a week doesn't stop progress. Also got family onboard for a weekly fast.

I started working out with weights 3 times a week (~50 minutes each) for the last month except last week was hectic so I didn't get a chance but continuing this week. Still having vegetable soup every day, no sodas, much less chocolate and junk food than when I began.